A Bay Area victim of a notorious 1990s serial killer has been identified nearly three decades after her death.
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The DNA Doe Project on Monday announced that it, alongside the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office, determined that a Jane Doe found on State Route 152 near Gilroy was an Oregon woman named Patricia Skiple. Officials said Skiple, whose family and friends called her "Patsy," was about 45 years old at the time of her death.
Keith Hunter Jesperson – otherwise known as the "Happy Face Killer" after drawing smiley faces on letters to authorities and the media – confessed to killing the previously unidentified woman, whom authorities referred to as the "Blue Pacheco" Jane Doe because she was found wearing blue clothes near Pacheco Pass, in a 2006 letter.
Jesperson, who is serving four life sentences in the Oregon State Penitentiary after confessing to strangling and killing Skiple and seven other women throughout the U.S., admitted in the letter that he sexually assaulted and killed a woman along a dirt turnout on State Route 152 at the end of May 1993. A trucker discovered her body on June 3.
Santa Clara Sheriff's Sgt. Shannon Catalano brought the case to the DNA Doe Project in 2019, more than a decade after Jesperson pleaded guilty to first-degree homicide for killing the formerly unidentified woman. The nonprofit identified Skiple as a likely candidate late last year, and sheriff's officials said she was confirmed to be the victim last Wednesday.
"This case was exceptionally challenging due to recent Norwegian ancestry which resulted in very distant DNA matches on GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA," Cairenn Binder, DNA Doe Project's team leader, said in a release on Monday.
"It would not have been possible to solve this case without the dedication of our law enforcement partners at Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office, especially Sgt. Shannon Catalano, whose tenacious efforts to solve the case made our job as genealogists as effective as possible," Binder added.
Sheriff’s officials thanked the Oregon State Criminal Investigations Division and Calgary Police Service "for their assistance throughout this investigation."
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